Dean,
We are going through a similar decision making process. The 3590s do look
very nice, but they are also very expensive (unless you can get them
discounted). Also, if you are looking at robotics, the 3494 is a much
larger, more expensive package than some of the entry level DLT robots,
such as Odetics or Breece Hill. When looking at upgrade costs, down the
road, it appears to us that upgrading DLT drives will be substantially
less expensive than upgrading 3590 drives, tho that is hard to know
ahead of time. We are looking at Breece Hill DLT robots right now, and
are told that we can upgrade the drives via simple replacement. The new
DLT7000 drives list for just over $8K, I think. I don't know what the
street price will be. That's a far cry from the $40k+ list price for 3590.
Also, we feel that overpurchasing capacity too much is not wise, since
storage prices keep declining rapidly. Since we don't feel that we can
fill up a cabinet of Magstar slots very quickly, we feel that a smaller
DLT robot will probably be more cost effective for us. That, however,
will depend greatly on how you are funding these devices, how much data
you're planning to manage, etc.
We have a price quote of $85 per DLT4000 tape cartridge.
We have NO first hand experience with DLT at this point, but would be
very interesting in hearing what others may have learned. I have heard
from one other site who has been using the BH robots with DLT drives for
a few months now, tho not with ADSM, and they are very pleased with them.
However, their previous technology was 8mm, so their expectations will be
different than someone coming from a mainframe/3490 background.
I am somewhat concerned that ADSM will not be able to drive the DLT drives
at their rated speed. At some point, I think database updates may become
the limiting factor. We are using regular fast scsi-2 drives for our db
(barracudas from seagate). We have not been able to drive our 8mm drives
at their rated performance, and I am not sure what the reason for this is.
If you do go with DLT, make sure you are running ADSM v2, or v1.2.1.
I just learned that DLT is not supported by v1.2.0, despite what IBM
advertises (<- sore point).
Those are my 2 cents.
..Paul
Paul Zarnowski Phone: 607/255-4757
Cornell Information Technologies Fax: 607/255-6523
Cornell University US Mail: 315 CCC, Ithaca, NY 14853-2601
---
On Tue, 6 Feb 1996 15:48:10 EST Dean Roy said:
On Tue, 6 Feb 1996 15:48:10 EST Dean Roy said:
>
> I'm trying to decide whether to purchase DLT 4000 drives or 3590's to
>use with ADSM. Can anyone comment on the DLT drives? They look great
>for the money but how do they perform over the long haul? Any comments
>about access times etc.? Also I have heard that tapes for the DLT 4000
>drive are very expensive - anyone have any cheaper sources?
>
> I think the 3590 drives look great but it's hard to justify the high
>cost of these drives. I also wonder if the 3590 isn't overkill when
>attached to an RS/6000. Can ADSM running on a 6000 pump out data fast
>enough to get a decent utilization of these drives?
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
> Dean Roy Email: DEAN AT UWINDSOR DOT CA
> Systems Programmer Voice: (519)253-4232 Ext 2763
> University of Windsor Fax : (519)973-7083
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
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